Aug 21–25, 2026: Starcloud $250M at $2.3B, Stripe confirmed OpenRouter (price still press), Fasset $68M at $1B, YC names Mundo/Apollo/Instant, Blackbird VC $1.05B (Australia — not our restaurant Blackbird). Hugging Face, Perplexity, and General Intuition remain talks.
MIT spinoff Apollo Atomics raised $31M seed (FCVC lead; YC, Alumni Ventures) for compact PWRs built in factories and trucked to site — >20 GW LOI pipeline claimed.
Apax Digital led Alice’s (ex-ActiveFence) $140M round — total $280M — with CRV and Norwest returning as labs and enterprises buy model testing and guardrails.
Greenoaks led Airbound’s $37M Series A (Aug 24, 2026) with DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba. Bengaluru startup targeting truck-cost aerial logistics with 13,000+ autonomous flights.
SBI Group led Fasset’s $68M Series C at a $1B valuation (Aug 24, 2026) — three months after a $51M Series B. $40B+ annualized volume, Own Network expansion, agentic corridor banking.
Manhattan West led a $250M extension to Starcloud’s Series A at $2.3B (Aug 21, 2026). Benchmark, Nvidia (~$25M), and Cisco joined — capital for Starcloud-2/3 and launch bookings as Falcon 9 winds down.
